“In the Dark Times will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing about the Dark Times”
–Bertolt Brecht (1939)

holy tenderness at spooky distance
     recalcitrant world looks up
the word chaos in Chaldean
     meant “without a library”
intersecting your oikos
     pleas of a household, green ethics
        attractor oracles, exile metabolism
wisdom of centuries, charnel ground
“earthshine” a glow on the moon
not fully lit but quaking the land
poet lineage resounds through
     heart-empire, through symbiosis
in our Trouble Time
     marvels of living fibers
     magical books, initiations
don’t break, ever: Blake, Rimbaud
Lorca, a web of life, of
     but hold, hold troubadour
a stylus    a notebook    we our own cabal
it’s now or never our climate battle
purple shoes      masks
packet of hand sanitizer
     you hand me as we part
stepping up to pandemic
     tasks — a rasp, a tune, power so close
          from a distant galaxy bon courage
          as inhabitants of the city
leave for the wilderness to save the wildness
movement a sinewy shamanic
               restlessness
forces of eye & art
ear’s transcendence to our century
           carved out
of purgatory      where we’ve been where
we’ve gone      where we will be                            next ?
                      in struggle
ride me your river to touch future’s
                           rapturous day

Jesse Paris Smith photo

It all begins with a vibration. An imperceptible movement that accelerates minute by minutes. Wind, along screeching whistle, a lashing hurricane, a torrent of faces, forms, line. Everything falling, rushing forward, ascending, disappearing, reappearing. A dizzying evaporation and condensation. Bubbles, more bubbles, pebbles, little stones. Rocky cliffs of gas. Lines that cross, rivers meeting, endless bifurcations, meanders, deltas, deserts that walk, deserts that fly. Disintegrations, agglutinations, fragmentations, reconstitutions. Shattered words, the copulation of syllables, the fornication of meanings. Destruction of language. Mescaline resigns through silence—and it screams!

—Octavio Paz, from from his Introduction to the Miserable Miracle by Henri Michaux, New York Review of Books, 2002.

The way we

The way we might in minutes

The way we might be shattered in minutes

The way we’ll stop and take it

We’ll go inside, fly

The vibratory room

Cross this line

We’ll wash our whole aura, our body, our musket of protection

The mask we’ll wash and dry and wash again and dry

And again wash til the hands disappear

The dangerous lift, you feel it?

The power, don’t come near me

On knees, you are invisible ally, a torch, a persuasion

What can you drive more into a nail than your tiny head

Crying for the medicine to treat the invisible bubble, the pebble,

Seep into the crypt

The dead code hovering around the cave, a rocky cliff, all upside down

I remember now the liberation then, how we’ve never do no harm then

Young in the maze,

Then, and now?

Cry for the medicine in the crook of your arm

I remember a myth was closed against all words

All words becoming every word trembling with damning light

Words, words

Because you sat on your cloud, but come down come down

Words

You are words only now, what else have you, poet?

Come down from that cloud

In the maze that was protection but we did harm

And the seal came off the prophecy for the human

One more time.

Alystyre Julian, Outrider film

Cairo tonguing

out
or Venice

Santa Maria del Soccorso

turbulent skies

1939 her
word
came out

walking

in a djellaba
to hide a body

what century
hold battle to tip a point

a Spanish flu

a viper tongue in lockdown?

plague in the house/ pox on the white houses!

Helsinki: hint of a wall disguised
as munitions

Prague,

bridge of dreams,
gets voice back

Vienna: nocturne of equilibrium,

teases stars,

salon:

Listen up!
larynx de-
fends

you will always be
futurity
fending
off
public
hex
in the courtyard

but wait enclosure

you are spy for desire, for love

(Britain Moscow Stalingrad Midway El Alhamein
Guadalcanal Monte Cessino
Normandy Bulge)

note: skulls in
fish bowl
preserved
in elixirs for near extinction

stations of a brutal cross

Arrete! “accumulations of memory”

syllables,
worry
themselves of
punctuation
an archeological divide
its asylum
its holy cell of imagined peace

o heal, o heal, o heal

(Fr the Archive: “Another comment objects to the phrase “tipping point” to describe when the planet reaches a threshold of irreversible climate change. “‘Tipping points’ is a propaganda slogan for the scientifically illiterate,” the comment reads. “They were a favorite of Al Gore’s science adviser, James Hansen.”
The conglomerates GREEN in the Biomass, a hoax…wake up, o Counties!
Are we at the “tipping point” where “chaos” in Chaldean meant “without a library”? )

Alystyre Julian, Outrider film

for Steve Cannon

How you’d enter like Tiresias

Prophet for the “coming community”

What do you say, see in interior eye, right there: moment’s breathing

How you enter poetry zones, sweet charge you take

And make welcome all, strays, devils too

And in your walk a gait for everyone who struggles

Where we might be in love with humanity’s crush.
all brother …sister… whatever…. Neighbor- hoods…

How you’d exude awareness every step

Like to weep how you enter the room the hall the church the place
the street the stage & recognize eternity’s
poetry

How you enter & we see you coming like a trumpet announces, O angels

And dear attendant at sleeve

How you held the confidence of poet up and beyond galaxies

How high does it go?

Very

A vow, focus, how many long years, Steve

And how bereft the night seems, the day, a dream, walking a world without you

Never a question how you set your great heart open all the neighborhood

And Tribe?

Inner seer,

How it is your epitaph “Tribe” a fury of hope?

Let’s do it

Wit and solace in how you lived it

Inner canonical, tribal

You’d seen it all

& rejoiced

Alystyre Julian, Outrider film

    bewilderment
on verge of
language
bursts
into
heliocentricity
“I’m with you
       in Rockland”
D train
  to Coney
poetry’s
   screed a
girl heart
tattoo
     glut
of death’s heads
now glints in
sun
hand gun?
when despair
no longer
     erases
sensibility
ink from the
T’ang dynasty
will re-appear
    mixed with
water
    from an
auspicious
well.

photo by Natalia Gaia

Delfica

Do you know, Daphne, the lyrics of that old song,
Heard at the foot of the sycamore tree or under the white laurels,
Beneath the olive tree, the myrtle, or the trembling willows,
That song of love that always begins anew? …

Do you recognize the Temple with the immense peristyle,
And the bitter lemons that bear the imprint of your teeth,
And that cave, fatal to imprudent visitors,
Where the ancient seed of the vanquished dragon sleeps?

They will return, these gods that you still mourn!
Time will bring back the religion of the old days;
The earth has trembled with a prophetic breath …

Meanwhile the sibyl with the Latin visage
Still sleeps under the arch of Constantine
– And nothing has disturbed the severe portico.

Translation of Gérard de Nerval

Myrtho

I think of you, Myrtho, divine enchantress,
Of lofty Posilipo with a thousand fires aglow,
Of your brow flooded with the radiance of the Orient,
And the black grapes mixed with your flowing golden tresses.

It is from your cup that I once tasted drunkenness,
And from the stealthy lightning of your smiling eyes
Back when I could be seen praying at the feet of Iacchus,
For the Muse had made me one of the sons of Greece.

I know why the volcano erupted again in that place….
It is because yesterday you grazed it with an agile foot,
And suddenly the sky was blackened with smoke.

Though the Norman Duke has destroyed your gods of clay
Forever, under the laurel boughs of Virgil,
The pale hydrangea unites with the green myrtle!

Peter Valente is a writer, translator and filmmaker. He is the author of 11 full-length books, including a translation of Nanni Balestrini’s Blackout (Commune Editions), which received a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. His most recent book is a co-translation of Succubations and Incubations: The Selected Letters of Antonin Artaud (1945-1947) (Infinity Land Press). Forthcoming from Semiotext(e) is his translation of Nicolas Pages by Guillaume Dustan.

Hubble Captures the Ghost of Cassiopeia

Here the queen is seen with her hair
piled high, frosty blue wisps pinned together,
her robes pooling on the sky-floor, swirled
around the seat of her throne. Her cheeks hold
a blush of laugher, her skin pricked with rose gold jewels.
She looks flawless underneath Polaris,
her shroud loose about her shoulders
like she hurries nowhere, dresses for no one.

We wonder where in this picture is the ghost?
Most would tell us it’s the light spread of frosting,
the iridescent river nearest the edge that mimics a body.

But what if the ghost is the biggest dark spot between her pale arms?
The absent center, the hole the whole image bends around?
Or what about the disparate brightest points?
The spots that bleed the camera’s pupil into exes?
Anyone who’s held a death knows how infinite
it becomes, light-years of hydrogen sparks in a dark sky.

Aly Pierce lives in Beverly, Mass., where she drinks coffee and mails you records from Deathwish Inc. Her debut collection, The Visible Planets, is available now from Game Over Books.

A Love Letter to the Tactile

After Chris Farley

Because I am good at inventing reasons I belong here,
I buy a “burnt sienna dress” with bell sleeves & identify as

someone who loves the 70’s. I go through a Dolly Parton
phase, play “9 to 5” every morning as I curate a business-

casual look to then walk in circles around the neighborhood,
recording the colors of the prettiest houses for a map in my diary.

I slurp down oysters & wait to absorb that same potential
for pearlescent shine. It’s not that I’m frivolous, just so good

at wanting everything outside myself, so good at coveting light
I forget you can see through it. I am a rainbow against the horrific

concrete business districts, uniform in literally every major city
in the US. I only believe in what I can touch so why would I

waste time on my own supernatural antics? Concept: At the end
of this poem, the audience applauds like I am Tinkerbell

& the only thing actualizing my body is their faith in it. Concept:
a horoscope is just the stars ordering cocktails after a long

workweek of being scientific & pragmatic & stuff. I’m trying
to be fun, goddammit. But all there is to do is collect acrylic nails

as they fracture from my own hands & become tiny funerals
for each time my own wants got taken seriously. Every morning

I make myself beautiful is an entertaining of superstition.
I apply for another job & stir basil I grew into the soup for luck.

When nobody is watching, I exist so much more than I can
afford. I guess I am “young” & “full of stars” & “a fervent believer

in witchcraft” & “a blue eyeshadow enthusiast” & “raucously
insisting on my queerness” & “love to show off at least my tits,

ass or legs at any given moment.” But I promise, when you’re
here, all you’ll see is a velour dress, floating, without a head.

Sara Mae is a white, queer fashion witch and community organizer raised between Baltimore and Annapolis, Md. She is the 2017 IWPS rep for Slam Free Or Die, a 2018 Emerson College CUPSI team member, and a 2018 Boston Poetry Slam NPS team member. She is the winner of the inaugural Peach Mag Bronze Prize, selected by Morgan Parker. Their first chapbook, Priestess of Tankinis, is out via Game Over Books. In her free time, she is learning burlesque in the studio or in her bedroom, and writing songs for her project Day Night Dress. If they could go to dinner with any famous person, they wouldn’t care who it was as long as there was Old Bay on the food.

poets here

Category: Issue 136

Delfica

Myrtho

Hubble Captures the Ghost of Cassiopeia

A Love Letter to the Tactile

Anne Waldman at 75